David Cay Johnston

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This is America’s 100th year for individual income tax, a system as out of touch with our era as digital music is with the hand-cranked Victrola music players of 1912. It is also the 26th year of the Reagan-era reform for both personal and corporate tax, a grand design now buried under special-interest favors.

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In a competitive market, economists argue endlessly about who bears the burden of corporate income tax. Is it owners, who get a smaller net return? Or workers, who make less? Or suppliers, who get lower prices? Or customers, who pay higher prices?

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President Barack Obama this week started pitching his plan to cut U. S. taxes for everyone in 2012 and then in 2013 raise income tax rates for high earners, primarily those making more than $1 million, many of whom bear a lighter burden than a cop married to a nurse.

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The Obama administration’s support for killing off the U.S. Statistical Abstract underscores what’s wrong with Washington’s approach to cutting the budget. This nearly thousand-page compendium of official data is in its 130th and evidently last edition since 1878. It is published online and in print.

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Author Profile

Reuters columnist David Cay Johnston is the president of Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE), an education organization with 4,200 members. A 13-year veteran of The New York Times, David won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for enterprise reporting that uncovered loopholes and inequities in the U.S. tax code. He wrote the best selling tax books Perfectly Legal, which won an IRE medal, and Free Lunch. His latest book, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind, will be published in September.